Toronto Mayor Is Accused of Using Cocaine

Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto, center, did not speak to reporters outside City Hall on Friday. He has called the charges ridiculous.

Brett Gundlock / Reuters

By IAN AUSTEN

May 17, 2013

OTTAWA — Mayor Rob Ford of Toronto has long been dogged by controversy over his often boorish behavior and less than diligent attention to work. On Friday, Mr. Ford faced his greatest political test following two reports that he is seen in a video apparently using crack cocaine.The Toronto Star and the Web site Gawker reported on Thursday night that they were shown the video on a smartphone by two men who were trying to sell it. The Star, which said that two of its reporters had watched the recording, reported that it was made by a man who said he had sold crack to Mr. Ford.

Mr. Ford called the accusations of crack use “ridiculous.”

The Star report said that the 90-second video shows Mr. Ford inhaling from what appears to be a glass crack pipe. At one point, the newspaper said, Mr. Ford, a Conservative, is heard making vulgar remarks about Justin Trudeau, the newly elected leader of the federal Liberal Party.

An intermediary for the video’s creators also gave Gawker and The Star a photograph of Mr. Ford posing with two men, one of whom appears to be a person later killed in what the police characterized as drug-related gang violence. Toronto has been afflicted with a number of recent killings that the police have linked to the drug trade.

While the episode appears to mirror the scandal that brought down Mayor Marion S. Barry Jr. of Washington in 1990, there are major differences. The videotape of Mr. Barry smoking crack in a hotel room came from law-enforcement surveillance.

The Star noted that it was unable to authenticate the video it viewed of Mr. Ford, which was produced by the drug dealers. The newspaper and Gawker declined to buy the video, although Gawker began an online fund-raising project Friday to raise $200,000 for it.

Mr. Ford suggested that the reports were part of a vendetta by The Star, but he had little else to say Friday to reporters gathered outside his house and at City Hall. He had stopped speaking to Star reporters while still a city councilor, well before his election as mayor in 2010.

Deputy Mayor Doug Holyday, a councilor from Mr. Ford’s suburban area of Toronto, served as his spokesman on Friday. In an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Mr. Holyday suggested that the video might be a fake and said that The Star should have bought it and determined its authenticity.

“Anything can be put on a tape if you plan it properly,” he said.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Holyday had suggested to reporters that the video might be the work of the mayor’s political opponents.

“There’s a large contingent of political people that want the mayor out of office,” he said. “They don’t want him to make the changes that he’s been making.”

Several City Council members, supporters and detractors alike, urged Mr. Ford to clearly address the allegations.

“We all hope that the inferences that are floating around are untrue, and the only one who can set us straight on that is the mayor,” said John Parker, a councilor who recently broke with Mr. Ford over the financing of Toronto’s transit system.

On one occasion Mr. Ford, who campaigned on a promise to end the city’s “war on cars” was photographed reading documents while driving his Cadillac S.U.V. on a busy elevated expressway in downtown Toronto, but rejected suggestions later that he should accept a driver from the city.

And when a well-known actress from a popular, long-running satirical news show appeared in his driveway with a camera crew for a mock interview — publicity some politicians seek — Mr. Ford called the police. He noted later that he had been the target of death threats.

An order to remove Mr. Ford from office in a conflict of interest case involving $3,150 he solicited from lobbyists for a youth football team he coaches was overturned on appeal in January.

Richard Florida, who studies urbanization as a professor of business and creativity at the University of Toronto, said that Mr. Ford’s polarizing approach to politics was a “symptom” of the tensions between the urban center of Toronto, which leans left politically, and the suburban municipalities, whose residents, including the mayor, often lean right. They became part of the city in 1998, and since then, Mr. Florida said, Toronto has become increasingly dysfunctional.

“What we need is a mayor for the whole city,” he said. “I just feel terribly sad. I don’t like the mayor, but I feel sad for him. I feel sad to see a city with so many aspirations just so stuck.”